It's simply frustrating when these remaining soaps use their diminished budgets as an excuse to put out terrible product at times. I think that if the story is compelling and the actors have proper charisma and talent, they could still attract some audience-I mean, the UK still has radio soaps that pull decent ratings! That relatively brief period in the 1980s and early 1990s when they had big budgets and tried to rival nighttime in production values and storytelling was not the normal way of doing things. These four seem to have stabilized, ratings-wise and though there are plenty of production challenges (lowered budgets, smaller ad budgets, etc.) one has to remember that soaps, historically, have always been low-budget, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type of productions.

Perhaps this is the appropriate number of soaps for the current daytime landscape-enough choices for the shrunken fan base. The four soaps that remain on network daytime TV are obviously the strongest of the bunch, the survivors from when there were more than a dozen of them airing daily. Producers can shrink away from the label, but many of them produce soap operas in all but name.

But one only has to look at the primetime schedule across network, cable, and streaming to see that serialized storytelling is still very popular and draws in many viewers. The overall drift of viewers away from watching daytime in general meant they had to 'do more with less' to fill those hours.

Those same execs seemed to move on from soaps toward talk shows and news-ish 'infotainment' shows because they were even cheaper to produce than soaps, while also attracting viewers to watch those commercials. Soaps airing in daytime became popular among TV networks because they were cheap to produce and made boatloads of money. It will never really 'go away' since it's human nature to be curious about 'what happens next'. I mean, Homer's epics were told around the campfire in the '.and then, you'll never guess what happens next!' format. Serialized storytelling has been around forever.

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